Nei Gong Notes, February 25, 2025
A Nei Gong class week, on the Ming Men. A good topic, an exercise that you do for a couple of weeks to open up the Ming Men / ignite the Ming fire. Which sounds useful to me, my lower back is iffy, so I could definitely use opening up there. And going through the lesson the first time was quite interesting: there’s a bit where you Song the end of your tailbone and I was pretty well absorbed in then, the Song was pretty powerful and it almost felt like something was coming out of the tip of my tailbone. And then you Song on your Ming Men, and that was pretty powerful too. Unfortunately, it hasn’t been that powerful when I’ve done it on subsequent days: I think I wasn’t getting absorbed enough. But I’ll keep at it; and maybe I’ll listen to the video again, to see if listening to Damo helps get me back in the right mood.
On Wednesday, I went through the Informal Zoom Session from Japan.
And the weekend was the Foundations course. I was a little worried that I wouldn’t be able to do a long Wu Ji session – when I woke up on Saturday I felt surprisingly awake but that didn’t last, I was flat out yawning half an hour into the Wu Ji session that morning. Fortunately, that turned out to only be a 1h session, and I lasted okay to the end of it; the longer Wu Ji session turned out to be Sunday, and while I wasn’t as energetic as would be ideal, I was awake enough to last fine through that. I think it was more like 1h50m instead of a full 2h, but still, the longest Wu Ji session I’ve done; and doing it without bells at fixed intervals turned out to be fine, my brain reacted to that by underestimating how long it had been, so I was pleasantly surprised when it ended.
Other than that, some shoulder opening; not a ton, but Rick says he’s thinking of putting us through that more next time, so maybe I’ll get back to working on that? Not sure; and I still do want to actually make it to two hours, so that will remain my focus for now. And we spent more time going up and down with good bodily connection, both as an isolated exercise and as part of Ji Ben 1-3.
Interesting Wu Song Shen Fa 1 session today: felt like stuff was moving more actively down my leg, and I also think I’m getting better at relaxing my foot quickly. Not yet getting as much upward movement as I’d like after that relaxing, though.
Anyways, I’ll try to mostly get back to normal this week. I definitely want to get back to Tai Chi, going through the various Chen forms and also spending more time on the Yang form. (It’s a Taiji lesson week, and I’d think about skipping a lesson if we were progressing with the form, but the next lesson is about something else.) And if I’m feeling energetic on Wednesday or Friday then I’ll try to do 2h Wu Ji, but I won’t worry about it otherwise, I put in enough work this weekend that I don’t feel like I need to press on that this week.